As someone who has helped friends move from exchanges to self custody over the years, I feel a sense of responsibility for the recommendations I have made, and continue to check in on them with routine reminders to make sure their backups are secure, and their devices are operational and receiving firmware updates.

I have tested and used a variety of hardware signing devices throughout my bitcoin journey, but always remained suspicious of ColdCard and the cult surrounding it. Maybe this is because I sat in on enough Clubhouse rooms listening to a certain person spouting off about how much better the device he sold was than other more commercially-friendly options that allowed users to store other tokens besides bitcoin.

When people I knew personally asked me which ones to buy, I always directed them to the options that I knew I could easily help them recover in an emergency, and these ended up being the ones sold by companies with product designs and websites that didn’t look like they were hobbies run out of someone’s basement. That stuff is fine for t-shirts and 3D-printed trinkets, but not for storing your family’s inheritance.

As such, I have never once felt compelled to recommend a ColdCard to any of them, and I am not fielding panicked calls from them today as a result.